Crime

The Stradivarius Affair

It isn’t every day that a street criminal—a high-school dropout with two felony convictions—is accused of stealing a centuries-old violin worth as much as $6 million. But nothing about the heist of the Lipinski Stradivarius, which galvanized the music world last winter, was normal, or even logical

It just isn’t every day that a high-school dropout and twice-convicted felon, your basic street criminal, as he was described, is the alleged mastermind of a crime that no one in law enforcement the world over had ever quite seen. Maybe it wasn’t the crime of the century, but it definitely was the crime of the century in Milwaukee. The city, known for beer, bratwurst, the Brewers, and frighteningly large portions at German restaurants, had never been a hotbed of headlines. But this made national and world news not seen since the days of the city’s own serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

The Milwaukee Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation put out dozens of officers and detectives and supervisors to crack the case and find a suspect named Salah Salahadyn.

Forty-two years old with a thin frame and the studied manner of someone trying very hard to be measured and professorial when he is neither, Salahadyn was a Milwaukee native and fancied himself a high-end art thief, according to police.

It is not exactly clear why he fancied himself this way. There was no evidence that he was a high-end art thief, except for one strangely bungled attempt roughly 15 years earlier in which he tried to return—for a finder’s fee—a $25,000 statue to the same Milwaukee gallery owner from whom it had been stolen. (In an interview with Vanity Fair, Salahadyn insists that he did not know the statue had been stolen.) He was arrested by police and given a five-year sentence for receiving stolen property.

His lifestyle, a free apartment and $400 a month in return for managing the apartment building, with two of his five children under the age of three, and fighting to make ends meet over the years by selling weed, did not seem the stuff of The Thomas Crown Affair either. He was articulate and well spoken, somewhat at odds with his fractured life. You couldn’t help but feel it all should have been better. But you only had to spend a minute with him to figure out that he loved notoriety even if it was bad, that he had a very serious case of grandiosity.

This idea of stealing a Stradivarius violin known as the Lipinski—299 years old, still eminently playable, and valued at somewhere between $5 and $6 million—did not just fall from the sky. Police say Salahadyn had been thinking of stealing a Stradivarius for at least a decade, ultimately setting his sights on the Lipinski because of the Milwaukee connection. He knew the patterns of his target, the routine of where he worked, where he parked, where he shopped, what car he drove, the name of his wife, all chilling because of the stalker aspect. According to police, Salahadyn went to one of his concerts, noting, among other details, that he was the only African-American there. He knew the history of what he was after, so much so that you could say he had become obsessed with it. This was no ordinary object of desire.

If you look at it another way, there was something dangerous and almost deranged about it, the kind of crime Abbott and Costello might plan, after consultation with Cheech and Chong and Martin and Lewis. There were also repercussions that could have been catastrophic far beyond the fate of a multi-million-dollar violin.

A Taser was used on Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Frank Almond as he was about to get into his car in a parking lot in subzero temperatures after a performance on January 27. Tasers in very rare instances have caused fatal heart attacks. In falling to the ground, the 50-year-old Almond could have cracked his head open on the patchy ice that had built up as a result of the frigid winter.

The Taser did immobilize Almond just long enough for someone to grab the violin case slung over his left shoulder. In that respect the crime went off just the way Salahadyn had allegedly dreamed of in prison—the ease of stealing a Stradivarius simply by grabbing it from an unsuspecting classical musician.

But there are two parts to an art heist such as this—stealing the object and then having a plan as to what to do with it afterward. It was in this second area that the scheme seemed stunted.

The getaway vehicle was a somewhat bruised minivan, sticking out like a phosphorescent bulb because of its maroon color. Police say its driver was not some trained professional but the mother of three of Salahadyn’s children.

It did not help that the Taser used on Almond shot out dozens of confetti-size identification tags, thereby enabling the F.B.I. to track down where the Taser had been purchased online and the owner of record.

It also did not help that the owner, the sublimely named Universal Knowledge Allah, or Uni to his friends, an affable barber and Tupperware consultant hoping to crack the middle-age-housewife party market, blabbed about details of the robbery (he was not at the scene that night) to a customer, who coughed him up to the police. It did not help when a former inmate who years before had been in the same Wisconsin prison as Salahadyn, sniffing a reward for the return of the violin, said in an e-mail to the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra that Salahadyn had talked in prison about stealing a Stradivarius. A $100,000 reward was offered, and in high-end thefts of this nature, it sometimes has the same effect as the perfect worm, with fishes jumping all over themselves to the top to get it.

It really did not help that unlike hubcaps, for example, or even a python, you can’t just walk up to someone in the street and say you know where you can get a really good deal on a stolen $6 million violin. It really really did not help that the Stradivarius happened to be stolen in perhaps the one place in America where the police chief didn’t think it was a form of Streptococcus and, fully cognizant of its cultural significance, decided to send in “the cavalry.”

The cavalry won.

In July the 37-year-old Allah, after admitting to his role in the theft, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. Salahadyn is scheduled to appear in court on October 3. According to Milwaukee Police detective Billy Ball, one of the key investigators on the case, the district attorney’s office agreed after his arrest in February to reduce the charge against him from armed robbery to robbery. In return Salahadyn agreed to lead authorities to the violin and also plead guilty, according to Ball.

Several scheduled hearings were postponed, one in July, when Salahadyn’s attorney withdrew as counsel, and the most recent in early September, when, eight months into the case, Salahadyn’s new attorney asked for a motion hearing.

As of mid-September, Salahadyn had still not filed any plea, although claiming innocence appears somewhat difficult for him because of a lengthy interview with Vice News in which he did a seemingly failproof job of incriminating himself. During the interview, which he gave without the knowledge of counsel, he admitted to being involved in the robbery of the violin and in the physical possession of it. He claimed that he had been coerced by an Asian crime syndicate that he had made contact with and performed various activities for over the years; in this case he said they wanted him to take the Lipinski to Chicago, presumably for eventual transport to somewhere else. But he said he had changed his mind because he could not bear for the priceless instrument to leave its rightful home of Milwaukee.

Federal and local law-enforcement authorities describe Salahadyn’s claims as ludicrous, ridiculous, and pretty much any other likewise description. Dave Bass, who is a special agent on the F.B.I.’s Art Crime Team and who works in the bureau’s Milwaukee Field Division, where the case was assigned, says there is absolutely no evidence that an Asian syndicate was behind this. He gives several reasons, the most cogent being: Why would any sophisticated crime organization trust a local thief from Milwaukee, particularly one with terrible judgment?

Bass believes the motive may have been the $100,000 reward that was being offered by private sources. It is not uncommon in art heists for someone to steal an object, send in “mules” to help “find” it, and then reap reward money, since owners are often frantic to get their property back with no questions asked. So perhaps the intent was to let the investigation die down, make sure no specific names had surfaced, and then aid in the recovery in return for at least a portion of the reward. The flaw in this scenario, as Bass notes, is that the money is not usually released unless there is a conviction.

Or it simply could have been what Milwaukee police chief Edward Flynn hypothesized: “We can’t ever dismiss the nitwit factor.”

Whatever the motive, it is safe to say that neither Salahadyn nor Allah could have remotely imagined the tsunami that was about to hit them. Nor could the Lipinski, whose nearly three-century journey up until the moment of the robbery had already been the musical equivalent of the cat with nine lives.

The Lipinski

On April 28, 2008, Frank Almond received a curious e-mail. The writer, who still refuses to be publicly identified, claimed something improbable. She or he said that he or she was in the process of inheriting a Stradivarius violin known as the Lipinski. Two or three times a year, Almond got e-mails similar to this, about the discovery of a Stradivarius. It was typical for someone who had reached Almond’s stature: two degrees from Juilliard and the Charles and Marie Caestecker Concertmaster Chair at the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. He’s also the founder of a much-acclaimed chamber series called Frankly Music and a guest concertmaster appearing with symphonies across the globe.

Since around 1666, when the singular genius Antonio Stradivari began making his own violins in Cremona, Italy, it is not unreasonable to assume that everyone in history has at one time or another come to believe that the violin shoved into the corner of the attic is in fact a Stradivarius when it was probably purchased at a Henny Youngman concert.

Not much is known about Stradivari except that he was a workaholic up until his death, in 1737. (The exact date of his birth has been pegged to sometime around 1644.) For centuries classical musicians and scholars and scientists have tried to pinpoint the exact reason that his instruments are still believed to be the best ever produced, an unequaled balance of upper partials and lower partials, bright and joyful at times and painfully beautiful at others. Trying to account for the uniqueness of the Stradivarius is something of a growth area unto itself. Some say it was the varnish (no proof). Some say it was because of wood that was indigenous to the Cremona region and is now extinct (no proof). Stefan Hersh, a leading expert in the field of rare string instruments, sums it up best when he says, “What certainly must be true is that Stradivari had to have a great intuitive feel for acoustics, astonishing skill as a carver, and a truly dazzling imagination to create the works he did.”

Many of those who have played a Stradivarius, whether it’s a violin or viola or cello, ascribe human characteristics to it. They talk about its soul and its moods. It is no accident that many of them, including the Lipinski, are named after past owners, in this particular instance noted 19th-century Polish violinist Karol Lipi´nski. You don’t simply repair a Stradivarius; you “stabilize” it. If you follow that line, the instrument can also be bratty, temperamental, imperious if it doesn’t trust you, and, like a runaway, prone to disappearance.

In past years they have reportedly been left in the trunk of a New York taxi, a Newark cab, a train in Switzerland, on a porch in Los Angeles, the seat of a Porsche, and the side of the freeway, once again in Los Angeles, after it flew off the top of a moving car, according to one account. Some were destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in World War II. Another had been camouflaged in sticky black shoe polish, and it was only on the precipice of death that the person playing it admitted it had been stolen 49 years earlier. Another was stolen from its owner in New York as she was critically ill and 19 years later has still not been recovered. Yet another was stolen from a sandwich shop at a London train station when the violinist using it had become distracted with her cell phone.

The Stradivarius has also been accused of fraud. The French being the French, whose role in the world seems to be to debunk everything that isn’t French, have instigated research studies, one in which maestro violin soloists played a variety of instruments and basically could not distinguish between a Stradivarius and a much newer violin.

The Stradivarius has not only endured but increased exponentially in value. In 2011 the Lady Blunt, in excellent condition and rarely played, was sold for nearly $16 million to raise funds for Japan earthquake relief. Auction-house asking prices have also gone up astronomically. In June of this year the minimum bid at Sotheby’s for a Stradivarius viola, very rare because so few were produced, was $45 million. (It did not sell.)

The Hill brothers, owners of a violin-making firm in London and believed to have been the leading experts on the Stradivarius, said in their 1902 volume that Stradivari produced a total of 1,116 instruments, the preponderance of which were violins. The Hill brothers believed that 540 violins, 50 cellos, and 12 violas could be accounted for, one of those violins being the Lipinski.

The Lipinski’s initial owner, Giuseppe Tartini, composer of the famous “Devil’s Trill” sonata, said the inspiration had come to him from a dream in which he handed the violin to the Devil to see what he might do with it. The Devil was good.

The owner up until 2008 was classical pianist Richard Anschuetz. The instrument had originally been purchased in 1962 for $19,000 by Anschuetz’s mother for his wife, concert violinist Evi Liivak. The couple had met in Nuremberg, where Anschuetz was an American war-crimes-tribunal translator and Liivak a refugee from Estonia whose father had been killed by the Gestapo. They performed all over the world together.

As a pianist, Anschuetz had no personal use for the Lipinski after his wife died, in 1996. The natural inclination would have been to sell it, particularly since Stradivarius instruments were booming in price. But he still loved her so much that he could not bear to part with it. So he kept it in his New York apartment and went about his business with extreme privacy, playing the piano into his 90s and finding solace in the works of Indian philosopher and yogi Sri Aurobindo.

Anschuetz eventually moved to Milwaukee to be closer to relatives after becoming ill. (He died in 2008.) The Lipinski came as well and was placed in a bank vault downtown. It had not been played for at least 12 years.

As Almond continued to read the e-mail, it became apparent that the person writing it was credible. There were too many meticulous details, like the violin receiving small repairs and new strings at Jacques Français Rare Violins, in New York, and being appraised at some point by Christie’s.

There was some question as to whether the Lipinski was ready to come in from the cold. But the writer of the e-mail wanted to meet with Almond and seek his advice. He was asked to keep the information confidential.

They ultimately met at the bank vault with Stefan Hersh, brought in because of his expertise. Almond was excited, but he remembers that Hersh, whose family had been in the violin business for more than 75 years, was beside himself. He knew the lineage of the Stradivarius perhaps as well as anyone in the world. The Lipinski had been made during Stradivari’s so-called golden period. This could be a historic moment.

A disinterested bank employee carried the case into a nondescript viewing room. It was opened.

Even in the unflattering fluorescent light, it was immediately clear that this was an authentic 1715 Stradivarius. The bridge was down. There was an open seam. But with restoration it could be playable again; under the circumstances it was in remarkably good condition.

The owner’s family, humble, with a lineage of public service in Milwaukee, could have kept it or sold it for somewhere around $2.5 million. But they admirably eschewed personal gain and collector vanity. Rather than force the Lipinski into early retirement at the age of 293, they decided its life should actively continue. They lent it to Almond with virtually no conditions.

Almond’s Joy

The problem with a Stradivarius is that once you decide to play one you actually have to play one.

The Lipinski was tough and demanding. Almond found out right away that “it maximizes your strengths and really, really illuminates your weaknesses. There is no place to hide anymore.” The most difficult thing was to learn how not to work so hard to get the most out of it, how to appreciate its fast response.

The more Almond played the Lipinski at concerts, the more the Lipinski began to respect him. They became comfortable with each other, then quite intimate. In a city choking on inferiority—the monolith of Chicago, 92 miles away, obscuring Milwaukee in insecure shadow—Almond was also determined to make the Lipinski a source of public pride. He gave interviews about it. He created a CD comprised of pieces composed by those who had owned it. He was obsessively careful with it, never letting it wander away. But he never thought the Lipinski would be the object of a robbery. F.B.I. special agent Bass, who has been with the Art Crime Team since its inception, said he knew of no instance of a Stradivarius being taken by force. “My initial thought [was] this was bizarre and made no sense.”

ALL WRAPPED UP Days after the Lipinski was stolen, it was found in a Milwaukee attic, swaddled in a blue baby blanket in a suitcase., From the Milwaukee Police.

“Call the Cavalry”

The alleged origins of Salahadyn’s plan to steal a Stradivarius traced back to the 2000s, when he was serving his second term in prison. According to the e-mail that was sent to the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra after the theft by the ex-prisoner, Salahadyn “would talk of stealing high-end art and how easily it could be stolen from unsuspecting victims. His dream theft was a Stradivarius violin because of its potential value and the fact that it could be snatched from the hands of a musician as they walk down the street.”

The night of January 27, as part of the Frankly Music concert series, Almond and three other musicians had just finished Olivier Messiaen’s extraordinary Quartet for the End of Time in the Schwan Concert Hall, at Wisconsin Lutheran College. Messiaen, who was French, had written it in a prison camp during World War II after being captured by the Germans. The piece had been emotionally draining. The audience did not make a sound immediately afterward.

There was a reception that lasted until about 10:15 P.M., when Almond and the other musicians left down a long hallway that ran parallel to the theater. Almond collected some items from the dressing room, then exited through a side door that led to a small parking lot. He walked out with clarinetist Todd Levy. The other two musicians, cellist Joseph Johnson and pianist Christopher Taylor, left ahead of them. The plan was to meet at a restaurant called the Knick.

The temperature was six below, with a windchill of minus 25. Almond, wearing only a thin jacket, had propitiously gotten a good parking space just a few yards from the exit. It wasn’t himself he worried about as much as the Lipinski, which might well pout at his next several performances if kept in the cold too long. It was slung over his left shoulder.

As Almond left he noticed a minivan parked next to him nearest to the exit. He assumed it was waiting to pick someone up. Then he noticed a man coming toward him. He was dressed in a bulky coat with a gray furry hat on top of his head with the earflaps tied. Almond also got a brief look at the person in the driver’s seat, a heavyset woman dressed in a parka and also a big furry hat. If Milwaukee had a winter fashion week, the perpetrators would have led the runway.

Almond figured the person wanted to talk to him about the concert. Then he saw him open his jacket and point something at him that gave off flickers of light.

Todd Levy had walked ahead to his own car, a Chevy Volt, when he heard the sound of somebody saying, “Ah! Ah! Ah!” He thought it might be some kids messing around, maybe drunk.

Levy ran over to Almond. By this time he was standing, but it was obvious he was in shock, as the object he had seen was a Taser.

Levy got him into his car. He was shivering and still stunned and generally freaking out. “This is my worst nightmare.” They immediately called 911.

The first patrol car arrived about five minutes later. The officers’ understanding of what had happened was apparently not immediate.

As Almond and Levy tried to explain, the cops were having considerable difficulty figuring out what they were talking about. The officers were extremely cordial and polite and professional, but more than once they probably wondered to themselves what they were doing out here in minus-25 windchill on a Monday night.

Almond and Levy tried to impress upon them the urgency of the situation. Whoever had just taken the violin might well be on the way to the airport as the first step in getting it out of the city and selling it. The officers congregating at the scene had their own problems, which could likely be boiled down to three distinct issues:

How do you spell Stradivarius?

What the fuck is a Stradivarius?

How could a violin—whatever it’s called—cost $6 million?

It seemed to be going in a circular direction, so Levy made a call to the orchestra’s development director, Tanya Mazor-Posner. She in turn called a member of the board named Mike Gonzalez, who was on a golf vacation in South Carolina. Mike Gonzalez in turn called Chief Flynn, who was a friend of Gonzalez’s. Flynn, in turn, was sound asleep, since it was about 12:30 A.M.

Flynn had been to Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra concerts. He knew Almond. He did not have to be given a quick tutorial on the Stradivarius. He called the sergeant at the scene on his cell phone.

“Sarge, Chief Flynn.”

“Really?”

“What do you got?”

“I got a guy here. Somebody robbed his violin.”

“Listen to me very carefully. This is not a violin. This is a fucking multi-million-dollar musical instrument. Call the cavalry.”

The investigation picked up a notch after that. Many notches actually. There were those who questioned the priorities of the department in expending such manpower on finding a $6 million violin that at the end of the day was still a violin. During the period leading up to the recovery, there were two homicides in the city, which did not sit right with critics given the number of detectives who had been assigned to the stolen-Lipinski investigation. (Both cases were reportedly solved.) But Flynn strongly felt otherwise. It wasn’t just the dollar value of the violin but its symbolic value as a piece of history that could never be replaced.

“This was Milwaukee’s little piece of the Western heritage,” Flynn said later. “We had just been challenged. It had just been stolen. And we were bloody well going to find it.”

To Catch a Thief

The next morning at around six, with the aid of G.P.S. technology, the violin case for the Lipinski was discovered in the middle of a street. It appeared to Milwaukee police inspector Carianne Yerkes, one of the supervisors on the investigation, that it had been thrown out the window of the getaway vehicle, presumably for the very reason that there might have been some kind of tracking device inside it. Not only had the Lipinski been taken out of the case but so had two bows, valued in the range of $50,000, another indication that whoever was involved knew something about the marketplace.

The Milwaukee Police Department explored the possibility that whoever took the Lipinski might try to fly out of the city with it. The Transportation Security Administration was asked to keep an eye out for anyone traveling with a violin. Interpol was contacted. The F.B.I. office in Milwaukee offered major assistance. Investigators followed up on hundreds of tips, with the possible exception of the person calling to say one of their in-laws was squirrelly.

There was speculation that this had been the work of the Russian Mafia or an Asian gang. But Agent Bass immediately felt otherwise.

Stradivarius violins had been stolen before, but they had been stolen quietly, out of a dressing room of a concert hall or from an apartment, so it took a while for the owners to even notice. You wanted to create as little noise as possible, when all this particular crime did was create noise that only got louder.

There was also the issue of who would buy a $6 million violin after it was stolen. Bass did not think there was a dealer in the world who would touch it, because it was so hot. As for the theory that a collector might want it even if he could never display it to anyone, Bass pointed out that collectors live to show off what they have collected. The Taser also didn’t add up. Bass thought it was a very odd and unsophisticated choice, the risk high that it would not work if you were not familiar with it. In fact, only one of the two barbs that were fired broke Almond’s skin. The other lodged in his jacket. There was another problem with the Taser: the confetti with the serial number that shot out when it was fired. It ultimately led to a distributor in Texas, who supplied the name and address of the purchaser, Universal Knowledge Allah. Police captain Jeff Point, the lead supervisor on the case, immediately assumed that it was a dead end, because how could anyone have a name like that?

On February 2, an off-duty Milwaukee police officer ran into someone he apparently knew from the street. This witness said he had gotten his hair cut by Allah the day before at a barbershop called First Impressions, where there was a lot of chatter about who would be stupid enough to do something like this, since you could not readily sell it. Allah asked the client for a ride home, during which Allah volunteered that about seven months earlier Salahadyn had asked him to purchase a Taser since he had a permit to carry a concealed weapon and Salahadyn could not get one, because of his record. Allah further said, according to the criminal complaint that was filed, that Salahadyn called him the evening after the robbery and told him he had gotten the “instrument.”

Allah confirmed to police what he had said in the car. Salahadyn was a client of his, he told police, and he had known him for at least seven years.

The mention of Salahadyn’s name looped police back to the e-mail from the former inmate. The investigation moved quickly after that. Salahadyn and Allah were arrested on February 3 and taken into custody.

It was a huge breakthrough. There was only one significant gap: Where was the violin?

During a search of Salahadyn’s apartment, according to Detective Ball, police had found a scrapbook containing general articles and pictures about the Stradivarius instrument. But there was also one from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel from 2008 about the Lipinski finding a home in the city with Frank Almond.

The Lipinski had been through a great deal in its history. It had survived countless wars and epidemics. But neither the Lipinski nor any Stradivarius instrument could have been prepared for the indignities it suffered after it was stolen. Taken from the bosom of its case, it had ultimately been placed in a soft-cloth American Tourister suitcase and transported to one of the worst possible places for its health, a cold attic.

CASE CLOSED Milwaukee police chief Edward Flynn with the recovered Lipinski at a news conference on February 6., By Jon Riemann/Milwaukee Police.

Lost and Found

When Detective Billy Ball interviewed Salahadyn, he said, the suspect seemed quite taken with himself. Ball recalled the following conversation:

“I figured you guys would be coming.”

“Why?”

“Because of my reputation.”

“What reputation?”

“My reputation as a high-end art thief.”

Ball said Salahadyn danced around that day and part of the second. He had the leverage of knowing the location of the violin. But police believed they had significant leverage of their own.

On the third day of interrogation, Ball said, a written agreement was made between Salahadyn and the Milwaukee County district attorney. Later that night Salahadyn led detectives to the apartment building where the violin was being stored. He guided them to the second floor, then pointed to the attic.

A search warrant was obtained. A ladder was borrowed from the SWAT team. Bass, who had handled high-value musical instruments before, climbed up the steps through the space in the ceiling. Bass’s biggest worry was that the violin had been damaged, and the condition of the attic did nothing to lessen that fear. The temperature hovered at about freezing, and such cold can be devastating: the wood of the violin might dry out, in turn causing a catastrophic split in the back. There was dust and insulation everywhere. But one item was free of detritus.

Bass unzipped the suitcase. He took a peek. Wrapped in a blue baby blanket with the logo of a little toy truck was the Lipinski.

Coda

The Lipinski has gone back to the mundane task of beautiful music. Almond continues to play it with regularity, the only major creative difference being that the Lipinski, a publicity hound at this point, sometimes seems to get louder applause than he does. Almond has also been supplied with security.

On Saturday, August 23, as part of the Music in the Vineyards chamber-music series, Almond performed at Hall Wines, in Napa Valley. He spent the night at a nearby vineyard.